Simone Stolzoff

And you don't need someone else to give you permission to do so.

The fastest way to turn that uncertainty into a little bit more clarity is through actually doing the thing that you hope to do.

Yeah, I mean, there's this dichotomy that I talk about in the book called the explore exploit tradeoff.

Imagine you are an engineer and your job is you work for Spotify.

You have to pick the next song that plays in someone's playlist.

For someone, you might play a song that's very similar to the last song that they listened to.

This is what would be called exploiting in computer science.

Or for someone else, you might pick a song that's very different from the last song that they listened to.

That would be called exploring.

And there's benefits to both.

Exploiting allows you to take that safe bet to play something that is similar to what they listened to before.

It's likely not to piss them off.

But too much exploiting will lead to something getting stale.

It's like someone who listens to a song on repeat into oblivion and then starts to hate it.

Whereas exploring is riskier.

You are trying to find sort of the balance of the character map.

But the potential upside is that you might discover something that the user likes that they didn't previously know about and expand your understanding of their taste.

In life, we need both.

So when you're younger, you have maybe a lot more capacity to explore.

You can go backpack around Macedonia, try out these different careers, or take classes that are outside of your major.